Gunel was very impressed with the farewell sermon of the prophet Muhammad. Perhaps nothing else made her feel so deeply content:
All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action. Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood.
Since her childhood she had felt a strong emotional bond to the prophet Muhammad. Like every child, she also had an interest in causal events. She had inherited this from her mother, who strongly believed in God’s existence but sometimes sounded very superstitious. Her father was a very conflicted person. Sometimes he wondered whether or not to believe in a God he wasn’t sure existed; sometimes he struggled with a demanding, harsh God he would like to have got rid of if he wasn’t so convinced of his existence and power.
But her case was different. When Habil left for Canada, she was four years old. She loved him so much that for almost a week she could neither eat nor sleep. She had very weird, scary dreams.
Sometimes she dreamed there was a monster under her bed or in the dresser, who would suddenly appear and swallow her father. She would wake up screaming “Daddy, daddy…”
Asmar felt helpless in this situation. She could only take her to the bathroom, wash her face with cold water or give a glass of cold water in order to calm her. Gunel wished her mother could see the monster under her bed, recognize it and help her to save Daddy. But she couldn’t express herself, or her dreams. Some people told Asmar not to pay any attention to Gunel’s dreams; they would gradually disappear. When Asmar blamed herself for letting Habil go to Canada and causing Gunel t...
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The Iraqi War that started in 2003 was successful in overthrowing the Baathist government, but it did not help the millions of children in the country.
Instead, it made their lives worse by affecting their participation in education in Iraq, which is the one of the worst places for children in the world.
Malcolm Potts, an obstetrician, reproductive scientist and professor of public health at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote for a Los Angeles newspaper that despite spending $3 trillion on the Afghan and Iraqi wars, the US failed to stabilize these countries. Dr. Potts blames high-fertility, patriarchal societies for the unstable condition in countries such as Iraq that make the lives of their people, especially women and girls, worse. He advocates for education in the fight against terrorism in poor counties.
The Centre for Research on Globalization has also noted that the Anglo-American occupation forces and Iraqi government have failed to fulfill the most basic physical, mental, moral and spiritual needs of the children of Iraq and to create a safe environment in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, resolution 44/25, dated Nov. 20, 1989. UNICEF Representative to Iraq Dr. Marzio Babille has reported that “every third child in Iraq, or about 5.3 million children, is still currently deprived of many of their fundamental rights.”
One of the fundamental rights of all children is the right to education. However, children in Iraq cannot safely enroll in schools. The situation is even worse for girls. In 2004 and 2005, only 2.4 million boys and 1.9 million girls registered at primary schools in Iraq. According to UNICEF, that meant only 44.74 percent of primary school-aged children had registered in Iraq. There was no rise in the enrolment of girls in the following years; instead 75 percent of girls dropped out during or after the completion of primary school. There were ...
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The world is happy to know that the girl named Malala Yousufzai from the Swat Valley in Pakistan is doing well and has been discharged from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham in the UK.
Yousufzai has become a hero for the majority of people in the world for challenging the anti-intellectual Taliban in her country, who identified Yousufzai as a threat to their political agenda when Yousufzai demanded education for girls. What Yousufzai wants is not different from what the Prophet Muhammad wanted for girls. Since the Prophet’s time until today, the situation has not changed. Gender inequality remains one of the biggest challenges in Pakistan in the 21st century. The majority of girls and women in this country remain one of the most uneducated people of the world.
Gender inequality in education in Pakistan
Pakistan is the second largest Muslim country after Indonesia and the number of Muslims in Pakistan constitutes 11 percent of the world’s Muslim population. However, gender inequality in education is still extreme despite the Quran’s spirit of “Iqra” (read). According to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), almost 77 million children worldwide are deprived of one of their basic rights: education. Girls make up 56 percent of these children. The Global Campaign for Education reports that more than 5.1 million primary school-aged children in Pakistan do not attend school. Sixty-three percent of them are girls. This is the third highest number of out-of-school children in the world. A chronic absenteeism from school among girls is worse in rural areas of Pakistan than in the urban areas. Because of the gender inequality in education, the UN Development Program (UNDP) 2010 report ranked Pakistan 120 out of 146 countries based on its Gender-related Development Index.
Pakistani socie...
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